I use a Lenovo ThinkPad X201i with gentoo with full satisfaction. However, recently I am experiencing some issues:

Problem: when working with Gnome (v3.6.x), at some point the interface freezes. I can move the mouse, and the cursor will move over the screen, but for instance the clock is frozen. After several seconds, the active window is blacked out. Then, I get the black screen that says "Sorry, something has gone wrong and the system cannot recover. Call a system administrator".

The keyboard is responsive. I use CTRL-ALT-F1 to get to a tty, log in as root, and restart XDM. Then, X will restart, but before the GDM login screen appears, I get the same error message: "Sorry, something has gone wrong and the system cannot recover. Call a system administrator"

After trying several things, I have a feeling that it is an issue with the Intel i915 driver. A snippet from /var/log/messages

Browsing in Google, I discovered this error, but in all cases with linux kernel 2.6.3x. I use 3.7.4. A more recent message pointed to a buggy combination of BIOS and hardware on a particular type of Intel motherboard. But in my case, the laptop was fine until now. Am I looking at broken hardware? If so, how to find out? Or can I somehow switch off the DRM and use the "old-style" Gnome instead of the "new-style" Gnome. I have used my laptop also with Xsession (twm) - in this case the error does not occur but I have not used the system long enough with twm to make a definitive conclusion.

Downgrading the kernel to 3.6.11 did not help. Yesterday evening two "crashes" in 10 minutes. The most irritating feature is that you have to restart the computer to solve it. Simply restarting X does not help because somehow the GPU cannot be "reset. Next try: downgrade the intel driver from 2.20.19-r1 to 2.20.13. Wish me luck...